ASICs have the whole world of altcoins in an uproar. In an arena where people are used to seeing 600KHZ hash rates, miners routinely mining with 250MHZ or more seems very upsetting. Some altcoin developers have decided to do nothing about this new wave of mining rigs, whereas others are going to do their best to make the world safe for low-hash miners.
AlterEgoCoin is one such coin. The coin developers claim that their coin will be resistant to ASIC and FPGA technology due to some ‘as yet unnamed technology‘ they will introduce at launch, as they claim in their Announcement thread.
The Alter Ego network will be secured by multiple hashing algoritms rotating in a pre determined cycle that will make AEC impossible to mine with any currently existing or in the pipeline type of ASIC/FPGA.
AEC mining will require a customised miner to mine and the miner is currently in progress. Exactly what algos and how many different algos that the miner will use will not be made public yet.
This has to be welcome news for miners who can’t afford the upgrade to ASIC or FPGA. If a development team has advanced knowledge of the hashing algorithms needed to pull of this feat, certainly they’ll have all the basics covered. According to the thread, they do. They HAVE released the Mac and Windows wallets ahead of time in password protected format. This important step has been missed for numerous launches lately and can’t be overlooked. It’s generally a sign of corruption, incompetence, or both. AlterEgoCoin has covered this area, but other possible red flags abound.
The Announcement thread makes an even more stunning claim concerning how the crypocurrency will trade.
In parallel with the coin and the miner we are working on a AEC/FIAT exchange that is planned to go live a few weeks after mining have started. The coin will by then be listed on at least a few major/larger exchanges and the market should have determined its value. We will be able to conduct IBAN/SWIFT/BIC transfers for up to 4000SEK or roughly 625USD per transaction without a know-your-customer process in full compliance with our local laws and regulations.
Coin Specs:
- Block value: 50AEC
- Block time: 2 minutes
- Block reward halves: every 500000 blocks
- Total coin supply: 50000000
- Difficulty adjustment: 5 blocks
- Start difficulty: 50 (to prevent insta-mining)
- Confirmations needed for transactions: 10, for the exchange the number of confirmations will be set higher!
- Confirmations needed for maturity of mined blocks: 120
- Clients available upon release: Windows, MacOS, Linux and Github source
What About The Red Flags?
Like most alternative cryptocurrency launches, this one has more red flags than China. In order to invest in an ‘IPO‘ like this, investors would need to believe that the development team was capable of living up to its claims. The part about the AEC/FIAT exchange is a bit hard to believe, as is the claim about resisting ASIC and FPGA technology. Sure, both of these ideas can be accomplished, but the team would have to be an impressive one.
Tell Us About The AlterEgoCoin Team
Here’s where things get a bit trickier. There appears to be one person ‘AlterEgoCoin‘ who is posting in the thread. His address is listed as ‘Stockholm.’ He references a ‘team‘ and ‘we‘ many times in his writing, but there’s absolutely NO evidence this project exists other than in the ANN thread. There’s no website or social accounts. Several names are mentioned as team members - namely Martin Johansson and Tobias Hanssonm, but no links are provided to their professional bios.
Is It A Scam?
Certainly the forlorn members of BitCoinTalk are concerned this is a scam. After all, they’ve collectively lost hundreds of thousands of dollars tossing money at shady IPOs this year and this one matches many of the criteria.
Let’s deal with the possible scam flags:
- Unknown dev created the thread.
- Unverifiable claims about ground-breaking technology and exchange practices.
- No web presence.
- No social media presence.
- An IPO!
- No Coin Logo!
- Poor communication from the dev ‘team‘ to potential investors.
- Lack of community involvement.
From the looks of the thread, AlterEgoCoin has put virtually NO MONEY into this new coin. He has not even paid for a coin logo design (which amounts to $5 in many cases.) The grandiose claims in conjunction with the lack of information and effort on the part of the web and social media presence leave me flat. I won’t go so far as to say that AEC won’t get the job done. Certainly stranger things have happened.
However, given the large number of scams and undelivered promises, I’d caution people to think twice before paying ‘IPO’ money to anyone, especially a team as unknown as this one.
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